"Part of the money will be utilised to attract top talent, apart from investing in technology, processes and brand-building," said Palikar, CEO of BHIVE.Payal Ganguly | ET Bureau | May 19, 2016, 08:02 IST

Early-stage investment firm Blume Ventures and other angel investors have invested about Rs 6.6 crore ($1 million) in coworking space BHIVE Technologies, which plans to grow its presence in Bengaluru and expand to Mumbai and Delhi.

"Part of the money will be utilised to attract top talent, apart from investing in technology, processes and brand-building," said Shesh Palikar, CEO of BHIVE.

"We plan to have over 2 million square feet of office space under BHIVE management across six major Indian cities over the next two years."

The company, Palikar said, was ambitious of taking on US-based shared working space provider WeWork, which is valued at $17 billion.

BHIVE, which competes with Bengaluru-based 91Springboard in India, hosts more than 150 companies at its facility in Bengaluru across four locations and manages 50,000 square feet of shared workspace.

The company appointed the former head of category management at Amazon India, Monnappa Bayavanda, as chief operating officer in February.

"They are already fine-tuning a template that can scale across all the rapidly growing ecosystems in the country," Karthik Reddy, managing partner at Blume Ventures, said about BHIVE.

"When they achieved 100 per cent occupancy in their largest space, we knew that they were onto understanding the dynamics and pricing policies that could make coworking spaces/shared spaces a success."